The budget office dismantles the tax reform: “Accounts at risk and the Flat Tax penalizes average incomes”

«If, on the one hand, the gradualness of the reform process appears prudent for the purposes of finding adequate coverage and useful for allowing taxpayers and the Administration to adapt to the new institutions, on the other hand, it exposes the risk that an application part of the planned interventions makes the system even more fragmented than the current one and more critical from the point of view of equity and efficiency”. The memory of the Parliamentary Budget Office on fiscal delegation is very harsh.

In thirty-five pages, the technicians underline some aspects which, they say, «appear particularly problematic: the expansion and introduction of new special regimes, as in the case of agricultural incomes and the incremental flat tax for employee income; the further compression of the scope of the progressivity of the personal income tax, as in the case of the application of the dry coupon also to the leases of properties used for purposes other than residential; the absence of indications on a possible future homogenization of the different tax rates or their coordination”. According to the Upb, “even if the reduction in revenue is spread over several years with a gradual transition towards the regime, the current state of the public finances and the high public debt impose the need to find adequate compensation in other forms of withdrawal , in the fight against tax evasion or through a reduction in spending which, however, appears problematic in the light of both the compression that occurred in the years that preceded the recent health and inflationary crises, and the increase in costs linked to the aging of the population which await us in perspective”.

The offices explain that the tax delegation «neglects some critical issues of our tax system. In particular, it does not intervene on the taxation of real estate, both of an income and patrimonial type, based on obsolete cadastral income and not very consistent with the actual characteristics of the buildings and their market value”. This «involves – observes the Upb – forms of erosion of the taxable bases of taxes, determines revenues lower than those potentially obtainable – both at a central and local level – and unfairness of the taxation system. At present there is in fact a relatively more favorable treatment – because it is more distant from the market value – of older properties and generally located in central areas than those of more recent construction, also by virtue of the failure to update the intended uses of the themselves”. The already mentioned specific Recommendations for Italy of the European Commission “suggest in this regard that the question of the revision of the cadastre be addressed”.